Remember That ‘Peanuts’ Special Where Everyone Was Mean to a Girl With Cancer?

Tomorrow, the first full-length Peanuts film is coming to theaters with a simple plot: There’s a new girl in town, whom Charlie Brown is struggling to impress. But back in 1990, the new student was a girl with leukemia—and almost everyone in the Peanuts universe treated her like shit.

What’s that? Not ringing any bells?

While most of us are familiar with Charlie Brown’s classic holiday specials from the ’60s and ’70s, the Peanuts franchise didn’t stop with Christmas and the Great Pumpkin. Charles Schulz and his producers released prime-time specials about Easter, New Year’s, and even Arbor Day.

After using up most major holidays as plots, the franchise even resorted to exploring Snoopy’s love life with 1985’s Snoopy’s Getting Married, Charlie Brown. (Spoiler alert: Snoopy’s not getting married—he gets engaged, has a bachelor party, and is jilted at the altar by his canine fiancé, who leaves him for another dog.)

By the time Peanuts was on its 33rd animated special, however, Schulz decided to depart from the more lighthearted fare of holidays and dog weddings by making a film to introduce an entirely new character named Janice Emmons, a young girl diagnosed with leukemia.

It’s a Cruel World, Charlie Brown

For viewers accustomed to a mostly harmless Peanuts gang—whose worst offenses were snatching footballs back at the last second and not sending Charlie Brown enough mail—the 1990 special Why, Charlie Brown, Why? offers a jarring deviation in tone, primarily because of how utterly shittily most characters treat poor Janice.

The film begins with Janice and the gang waiting for the bus. After they board, Janice notices a growing number of bruises on her skin. Meanwhile, a spoiled Sally whines from the back seat that she hates riding the bus.

Janice gets a fever in class. The following day, she’s absent from the bus stop. But when Charlie and Linus express concern, Sally finds yet another reason to whine.

“Why does everyone worry so much about Janice?” she demands. “I’m the one who’s going to have a bad day … because I left my lunch sitting on the curb!”

When the kids arrive at school, their trombone-playing teacher informs them that Janice was admitted to the hospital. So Charlie and Linus decide to visit her.

Soon after waking Janice up, she tells them her diagnosis, to which Charlie Brown immediately replies, “Are you going to die?”

Speaking for anyone with a common sense of decency, Linus exclaims, “Good grief, Charlie Brown! What kind of question is that?”

While Charlie and his sister Sally can be excused for their temporary bouts of ignorance, what follows in the film is uncharacteristically cruel for any Peanuts character.

Linus returns home from the hospital to find his sister Lucy watching television.

“Where’ve you been?” Lucy asks, turning to face her brother.

“Charlie Brown and I have been visiting Janice in the hospital,” Linus responds. “They say she has leukemia.”

Lucy resumes watching TV, pausing a beat before asking, “While you’re up, why don’t you get me a glass of milk?” She holds out her hand, gesturing for him to fetch the milk, completely uninterested in the news that her classmate was just diagnosed with cancer.

It gets worse.

Linus comes back with the milk and continues his story, recalling when Janice first felt sick.

“I remember touching her forehead,” he shares, “and feeling how warm she was.”

At this, Lucy suddenly swivels away from the TV—but not out of sympathy for Janice’s health.

“You touched her?” she shrieks. “And now you’re handing me a glass of milk? You could catch leukemia from her and give it to ME!”

Linus carefully explains that cancer is not contagious, but Lucy is obstinate, arguing, “She probably got it because she’s a creepy kid.”

Again Linus tries to reason with her, insisting that “Janice didn’t get cancer because of something she did wrong—it just happened.”

But even without an argument to fall back on, the carcinophobic Lucy refuses to drink the milk. Which is pretty fucking harsh, even for someone like Lucy.

The cruelest kid in town, however, is a nameless boy wearing a sweater with the letter “B,” for no obvious reason other than to clearly label him as the bully of the film.

Months after Janice’s initial diagnosis and chemotherapy treatments, she is well enough to return to school, donning a new pink cap to hide her hair loss.

At recess, the pint-sized douchebag in the “B” sweater ambles over to Janice and Linus, asking, “Say, who’s the kid with the pink hat? Pretty cute, does it fly?”

He knocks the cap off Janice’s head and mocks her hair loss, taunting her and calling her a “baldy.”

At this point in the film, it’s hard not to stop and wonder, “Why the fuck are all these kids so mean to Janice?”

But before you have a chance to articulate that thought, the normally gentle Linus leaps out of character and grabs the bully by the sweater in righteous indignation.

“JANIS HAS GOT LEUKEMIA, CEMENTHEAD!” Linus screams in a rage, as Janice weeps on the side of the frame.

“That’s CANCER!” he roars. “Have you ever heard of CANCER?!”

Even after the traumatizing recess incident, Janice still gets shit from her own family.

When Linus stops by the Emmons household to deliver a Christmas present, Janice’s sisters are less than enthused.

Clearly jealous of the expressions of sympathy and support, she concludes, “Actually, she’s become a real nuisance.”

(Both the bully and the sister apologize, of course, but only after Linus sets them straight.)

The Letter That Inspired the Film

For most casual Peanuts fans, it’s shocking to see so much cruelty directed at one elementary school girl with leukemia in the span of a 22-minute animated special.

Although each scene is clearly intended to teach a specific lesson (Lucy should be less ignorant, the bully should be less of a dick, and Janice’s sisters should learn to be grateful), the characters of Why, Charlie Brown, Why? are a far cry from the basically nice, happy-go-lucky kids of the film debuting tomorrow—or those in the more popular Peanuts predecessors.

This departure in tone goes back to the 1990 film’s authorship.

Unlike other Peanuts film plots, this special didn’t begin with an idea from producers or network executives or even Charles Schulz.

Instead, the inspiration came from a letter Schulz received in 1985, written by a nurse named Sylvia Cook. In a 1990 Chicago Tribunefilm review, Eileen Ogitz relates how the artist and nurse got together:

“Day after day … Cook watched her young patients endure arduous cancer treatment, not fully understanding what was happening to them or why …

“I wanted to make it easier for them,” Cook said. “A cartoon about a child with cancer would really help … And the Peanuts gang, near universally beloved by kids, could do the job better than anybody …'”

Schulz responded to Cook’s letter by promptly calling her and agreeing to take on the project.

Initially, the film was intended to screen only in hospitals, as a cartoon to help young cancer patients cope with being sick. The aim was to use educational scenes—like when Janice informs Charlie and Linus about each of the tests she underwent—to answer common questions kids posed after being diagnosed (hence Linus’ debunking of Lucy’s theory that cancer is contagious).

The heart of Cook’s pitch, however, was including a character with whom young kids with cancer could relate—a rarity in animated films, even 25 years later.

As the story developed—helped along with editorial input from Cook and members of the American Cancer Society—Schulz and his producers decided to expand the project from a short film for hospitals to a prime-time special, which aired March 16, 1990 on CBS.

Although the film ends with an idealistic image of a fully-recovered Janice soaring high above her classmates on the school’s swing set, her long blonde hair restored, Why, Charlie Brown, Why? remains an oddly progressive film among children’s cartoons at the time. It attempts to tell a complicated story in an otherwise simple world—even at the risk of making half of its main characters look like assholes.